Integration and Providing of BYOD Model Into Universities

Bring Your Own Device, more commonly known as BYOD, is a popular and emerging trend wherein people bring their own devices for work purposes. In the case of an IT company, employees carry their own laptops to work. They access the organization’s resources through well authenticated software, which ensure that the company’s data is secure.

Below mentioned are the advantages of using the BYOD Model in a university:

• Increased productivity. Students are more likely to be more productivity when they work on devices that they have been using from a long time. This way, they can focus more on their assignments and projects.
• Reduced company device costs. Since the students will be carrying their own devices on a daily basis to the university, the university need not spend on the devices that they have to procure.
• Ease of transition of incoming and outgoing student mobile network access. With good BYOD management, you will be able to manage access to your university network without interfering with a mobile device. This means you can create new student access and terminate access to outgoing students with ease. 

Lending Laptops to Students

This option, where the university offers to avail loan laptops for students is a debatable option. It can prove to be advantageous in the case where the number of students who are present in the campus at any given time of day are less. This way, the cost incurred will be reduced. Another major advantage of using laptops given by the university is that the laptops would be configured as per the requirements of the courses. In this way, no time is wasted in setting up the laptops. 

However, there are many drawbacks to this approach. Firstly, the cost which would be involved in buying and setting up the laptops would be extremely huge, considering the fact that the university will be running all year round and it will have at least 1000 students in the most ideal case on a daily basis. Another disadvantage of using this model would be the limitations on the usage of the laptops. For instance, if the students are planning to install new software that is incompatible with the configurations of the laptop provided, then it will prove to be useless for the student.

Existing Model- Keeping Computer Labs

The single most biggest advantage of this option is that there is no additional cost that will be incurred in setting up any new devices or software. However, a major drawback of this model is that it becomes cost intensive when the number of students keep increasing, that is, there is an issue with the scalability.

Challenges in Implementing BYOD

The three top requirements that organizations cite for successful implementation of BYOD include having a student code of conduct, installing security programs, and requiring management rules. What happens when one uses their own devices in the university is that they tend to focus on other things, rather than what is being taught at the university. This could be browsing through social media and other activities that are not related to the course. Another major challenge for the university would be to handle the user data. Care should be taken to not interfere with the personal data. The network management software must also ensure that once the students are logged in to the university network, unwanted websites are blocked and managed properly by the IT team.

Addressing Software Installation

Virtualization

As stated on opensource.com, Virtualization is the process of running a virtual instance of a computer system in a layer abstracted from the actual hardware. Most commonly, it refers to running multiple operating systems on a computer system simultaneously.  The advantages of switching to a virtual environment are plentiful, saving you money and time while providing much greater business continuity and ability to recover from disaster. Reduced spending: as opposed to buying multiple servers, that would cost a huge amount of money, virtualization ensures that there is minimal hardware that must be bought, and this in turn leads to low expenditures. Easier backup and disaster recovery: disasters are swift and unexpected. Virtualization ensures that lesser manpower and more efficient backup mechanisms are implemented, as everything is virtualized.

The disadvantages of virtualization are mostly those that would come with any technology transition. With careful planning and expert implementation, all of these drawbacks can be overcome. Upfront costs: depending on the size of the university, the cost of setting up the virtual environments might vary. Considering that MTU has about 8000 students on campus, the costs can be covered. The things that must be bought are additional hardware such as servers with good processors, and the software that will be installed on them. Software licensing considerations: many software are often not configured to run on virtual environments. However, these days, most of the vendors are moving towards implementation on virtual environments. However, it is good to enquire the software vendor once. 

Software as a Service (Saas)

As specified on ionos.com, with SaaS, software is centrally provided as a service through the Internet. Users create individual accounts and accruing costs are billed monthly or annually. The applications do not run on their own computer, but are called up online. The provider is directly responsible for providing, maintaining, and updating the programs. Users only need to access the software through a web browser.

Advantages of using Saas:

1. Quick commissioning and provision of services to customers: instead of downloading and installing the software packages, the user must simply login online to make use of the software.
2. The provider deals with maintenance, which is a relief to employees: since the entire software is being bought as a service itself, the entire support is provided by the vendor themselves. This way, the IT team can focus more on their own resources.
3. Easy integration for new students: there is no need to license and install software for the new students. It can be done simply by creating a new user on the server of the vendor and integrated into the student’s device.

Disadvantages of using Saas:

1. Sharing your data with the provider: one major drawback of Saas is that all the data is stored on the vendor’s side. Although the company may claim that the data is secure, one can never really be sure about it.
2. Danger of service termination: if all of a sudden the SaaS provider shuts down their company, then all the data will be lost and the service will be terminated.
3. Software cannot be used during downtime: there is no software vendor that can guarantee 100% uptime for any software. When there is downtime, the efficiency will be affected.

License Managers

Another alternative to provide the required software is to buy a few licensed versions and ensure that the students have access to them. The advantage of such an option is that it is completely secure and complete support is given. However, a major drawback to this approach would be the concurrency, i.e., for instance if the university has purchase about 100 legitimate versions of a particular software, then at any given time, only 100 of them will have access to it, and if anybody else is trying to access the software, it will not be possible.

Switching to Open Source Software

The last option to provide software to students would be making use of open source software. In most of the scenarios, this would prove to be the best solution as there is minimum cost involved in it. One of the other benefits of using open source software is that is easily compatible with any kind of network topology that the university wishes to configure. However, there are certain drawbacks to this option. Firstly, most of the open source software do not provide adequate support, as there is no single organization that is held responsible for its development. Secondly, one must consider the security aspects of an open source software. Although most of them are secure, one needs to completely evaluate and do sufficient research about such a software, before rolling it out for the students.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the best solution for MTU would be to go ahead with integration of Bring Your Own Device model and inculcate virtualization using Software as a Service along with it. This way, not only would the university have to spend a lot of money in setting up the infrastructure, but it will also become extremely easy to integrate with the already existing backbone network. Since BYOD lets the students bring their own laptops and mobile phones to the university, the networking software present in the Access Points such as routers should ensure that the data is secure and encrypted. This would mean to upgrade the software to handle this. The additional costs that would be incurred in the process is installation of additional routers within the university, as students will be using their own devices across the entire campus, and connectivity should not be lost. Another infrastructure that must be implemented along with the routers is the Extended Service Set (ESS), which will ensure that the data is automatically transferred between the Access Points. If there is enough budget that the university, then purchasing a private cloud could be feasible. However, in the case of system outage, the university will be dependent on the IT team of the cloud provider, as opposed to the dedicated IT team that will handle the virtual machines in the university.

References

• Aaron M. French, C. G. (2014). Current Status, Issues, and Future of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). Association For Information Systems, 193-194.
• An Overview of SaaS. (2018, April 03). 
• Cisco Bring Your Own Device. (2012, February 1). 
• Difference Between Cloud Computing and Virtualization. (2018). 
• Faircloth, J. (2014). Enterprise Applications Administration. Elsevier Inc.
• r & g technologies. (2018). 
• The Advantages and Disadvantages Of Virtualization. (2015, July 14).